The Great Bay…

Shariputra,
Form does not differ from emptiness;
Emptiness does not differ from form.
Form itself is emptiness;
Emptiness itself is form.
So too are feeling, cognition, formation, and consciousness.
– Heart Sutra

The days have turned cold. Working inside (grateful for that!)… Life flows on.
Good Friends are coming to town! Always a joy!

Based in scientific reality, Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay (North Atlantic Books) presents a powerful fictional vision of a fast-approaching future in which sea levels rise and a decimated population must find new ways to live
Preorder a signed edition of The Great Bay!

For a while they buried the bodies in mass graves with bulldozers. The National Guard had been deployed since the imposition of martial law. When the disease spread and the bodies became too many, they just burned them in houses, sometimes a whole block at a time. The electricity failed in August. In a week the gasoline supplies ran out and the smell of carrion in the cities was overpowering. Corpses lined the streets where people had carried them out of their houses and apartments, while there were still enough people who wanted to do that. Occasional helicopters flew over the cities telling people to stay in their homes. Nobody had any better idea. Dogs ate at the corpses and some people shot at the dogs; others, in frustration, shot at the helicopters.

2021 had been the hottest summer on record, even topping 2020. The power grid had been stretched to the breaking point for weeks. The “strategic oil reserves” had been depleted the year before—an election year—though the election was never held. The Government had imposed rationing, though it didn’t extend to private jets or to the Air Force. The stock market closed. Paper wealth disappeared overnight.

The disease struck the National Guard as hard as everyone else in the cities. Actually, the guardsmen stayed on the job longer than the corporate security armies protecting the wealthy suburbs, who equaled them in numbers. The guardsmen had a sense, at least a little sense, of legitimacy and loyalty to a cause beyond themselves. In the twenty-first century no one looked upon the corporation as the East India Company, as the spearhead of progress for whom the noble were willing to die. Nonetheless, by the end of August most of the guardsmen had deserted to escape the cities or to try to find their families.

One by one the power plants went dark, another kind of funeral pyre with no one to light it and keep it burning.

Nobody agreed on the precise nature of the pandemic. The government blamed an Asian influenza. Doctors said it was a new kind of chicken pox, or smallpox. There was a rumor that the disease was an army bug, a genetically engineered biological weapon that had back-fired, perhaps brought back by soldiers returning from the oil fields in Central Asia. The disease certainly spread with an engineered efficiency—200,000,000 died in the United States in the first month.

Most agreed the power outage started in the Southwest, and that the blackout had spread from there.

In California the pumping stations went down. Los Angeles was without water, as was San Diego and most other large cities. The pandemic showed no signs of abating. People were still getting sick. The cities were the worst. Dysentery was widespread. There were rumors of typhus. Nobody wanted to risk infection. Nobody wanted to be around other people. In Central California the owner of a 40,000 acre ranch tried to protect the sovereignty of private property by shooting two trespassers and was killed by the third.

By October the population of the United States was about fifty million. Many had survived the disease, if crippled or blinded—but the disruption was complete. People camped out in the country, alone, or in small groups. Sometimes whole families had escaped the infection, sometimes whole families had died together. Mostly, the world had become widows, widowers, and orphans.

There were no workers. Small groups of police operated as armed bands for their own benefit, pillaging and killing those who resisted. Regiments of the regular army were still functioning, but without electricity or fuel they had no clear objective. They couldn’t find the people needed to bring back the power grid. Central leadership disintegrated, or was ignored. Entire regiments went AWOL.

Rumors of a refugee camp at the Vandenberg Air Force Base sparked a mass emigration from Santa Maria, thousands streaming twenty-five miles down Highway One through Casmalia onto the Base. A colonel ordered his command to fire on the crowds to keep them out. No one obeyed his orders. The crowds swamped the Base and refused to leave. After ten days they were too weak to leave.

In Lompoc 200 forgotten prisoners in lockdown died in their cells.
_______________________

Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie – Neil’s Theme

_______________________Basho – 5 Poems
—
Cicada…

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die

—
A Bee

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
—
The Pond

An old silent pond…
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.
—
Dragon Fly

The dragonfly
can’t quite land
on that blade of grass.
—
Caterpillar In Fall

A caterpillar,
this deep in fall–
still not a butterfly.
______________Zen Poems

My daily activities are not unusual,
I’m just naturally in harmony with them.
Grasping nothing, discarding nothing…
Supernatural power and marvelous activity –
Drawing water and carrying firewood.

– Layman Pang-yun (740-808)
—
The mind of the past is ungraspable;
the mind of the future is ungraspable;
the mind of the present is ungraspable.

– Diamond Sutra
—
My legacy –
What will it be?
Flowers in spring,
The cuckoo in summer,
And the crimson maples
Of autumn …

– Ryokan (1758-1831)
—

Loving old priceless things,
I’ve scorned those seeking
Truth outside themselves:
Here, on the tip of the nose.